Adventures in Effulgence

Effulgence is an RP (role play) conducted on Dreamwidth between Alicorn (me) and Pyth (a.k.a. "kappa"). We each play many characters; all of my RP accounts belong to the Dreamwidth community "belltower", and kappa's can all be found at binary_heat. The short version of what Effulgence is about is that we put alternate universe versions of Bella from my fanfiction Luminosity in a wide variety of settings, mostly fanfictional in nature, and see what happens. (Luminosity is canon for Effulgence, but the reverse is optional.) Kappa also has several recurring character templates, most commonly AU versions of her oddball interpretation of the Nolanverse Joker. The start is slow - it's earthfic right up until it's not, but then it's really not.

Content warnings: Effulgence contains rape, torture, and parental abuse; these are generally not described in gory or graphic detail (people have proven able to blink and miss two of the instances of rape; we're apparently too good at euphemisms) but definitely present. It's a pretty long work and was originally written without thought of public consumption, so chances are it contains some other things we're failing to think of. Proceed with caution. Basically, if you can think of a way to be mean to characters, we've done it or gleefully intend to.

The table of contents here will show what posts to read in what order. Most posts are marked with one or more "symbellas" - symbols that indicate which Bells appear in which threads. These are in many cases exotic characters that might not render correctly on your computer, but they shouldn't be strictly necessary to enjoy the story.

Threads with a plus sign next to them are incomplete, as are sections with plus signs in their subchapter listings. The "chronological order" of the last several sections relative to each other is up in the air until they interact with the core plot, and may rearrange when that occurs. Additionally, there are a few spots where reading the threads in order will involve temporal confusion because they were written concurrently without anticipating third-party readers; just keep reading through these and you should be fine.

Due to limitations of Dreamwidth, we cannot edit any comment that has replies under it. (We could edit this mirror, but since we predominantly operate on Dreamwidth there would be little point.) Please don't submit notifications of typos in Effulgence unless they're on the top-level posts or the last comments in a thread. Or if you can't understand what was meant and you need clarification.

Both I and kappa are eager to hear comments on the RP. You may email me at alicorn@elcenia.com and I'll forward your remarks to kappa. If you can access Dreamwidth, you may ask characters questions and receive answers in-character.

A note on "canon-puncturing". Characters, as people, sometimes consume and refer to fiction. The problem is we keep adding AUs of the fiction in question, and so sometimes these are universes that characters from other universes have mentioned in the past. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this is just a lack of foresight and it is retconned insofar as it can be when we can't edit things. Please assume, for example, that when you reach a Harry Potter AU, that all previous references to Harry Potter were instead describing some equivalent but not particularly reminiscent story. The exceptions are as follows (may contain spoilers, depending on how finicky you are about spoilers):

In most Earth-typical universes that do not contain actual live Matildas, the Roald Dahl book "Matilda" (but not its movie adaptation) exist. This book never coexists with a Matilda, however. (The fact that it has taken some characters such a long time to notice this is mostly poor communication on our part, although there is an adequate thread of causality covering it.)

We are treating Pokémon about like we treat vampires: some universes have fiction of them. Other universes have real ones. The details like region names, organized crime team names, and city names that we use for the Pokémon AU and are taken from the games or anime may be assumed to be replaced with comparable but not particularly reminiscent versions in the fiction about Pokémon from other worlds.

In some worlds ("Sunshine family" worlds) various Marvel Cinematic Universe events began to unfold, but did not complete the process. In at least one, they were cut short very early (specifically, Captain America existed but the project did not work very well and there is fictionalized media about what might have been). There are some worlds where the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe is approximately taken as canon, except our obvious changes as described.

If you find a bug, incorrect scraping, or other defect in the HTML mirror, please email liam.m.dalton@gmail.com or submit an issue report via the Github page. (Github requires an account to log issues.)